Main cast: Mary Ellen Trainor (The Wife), Larry Drake (Santa Claus), Marshall Bell (The Husband), Lindsey Whitney Barry (Carrie Ann), and John Kassir (The Crypt Keeper)
Director: Robert Zemeckis

And All Through the House was also one of the stories in the Tales from the Crypt full length movie that came before the TV series, with Mary Ellen Trainor stepping into Joan Collins’s shoes for the role of the unnamed homicidal wife. This one retains the campy, cartoon feel of the movie version.

It is the night before Christmas, and our wife decides to make her Christmas wish come true. When her rude, boorish husband wants her to pass him the fireplace poker and snaps at her to “let him have it”, she does just that – right into his head. Now she and her boyfriend can inherit her husband’s money! Alas, getting rid of the husband’s body is not as easy as she imagines it to be, and worse, there is a madman on the loose – dressed in a Santa Claus suit, of all things. And then, there is her daughter who will do anything to be visited by Santa Claus, and I’m sure you can tell where this one is heading.

This episode is a head-scratcher, because the first fifteen minutes or so are entertaining camp, with Mary Ellen Trainor putting on a most amusing turn as this amoral wife who is positively gleeful that her husband is death, only to have her glee turn to dismay when she has to do some heavy hauling. But once Santa shows up, her character turns unexpectedly into a blithering, screaming idiot, embodying every irritating dumb horror movie damsel trope out there, and I can only wonder what happened to the previous entertaining version of this character. Her character regresses throughout the episode, culminating with her just standing there and screaming. Ugh.

And then, there is the horrible robotic acting from the girl who plays the daughter, with the dear girl mouthing her lines in such a robotic manner that I wonder whether they are using some text-to-voice program for her lines.

And All Through the House is on a downhill slide from start to end, with a lousy pay-off, so it’s not worth a look unless you have a fondness for idiot women who scream a lot.